The paper deals with the word without and its role in those kinds of collocations in which it has a meaning-carrying function. It is assumed that the meaning of without in the kinds of collocations under scrutiny is context independent in that it can be explicated by a singles cheme: For every ξ,ξ ...ξ holds, that Π(ξ,ξ ...ξ) if not Θ(ξ , ξ ... ξ ), where Π, Θ are propositions or propositional functions (predicates) and ξ , ξ ... ξ are relevant variables, whose range is determined by that following after the word without. The scheme varies with the variable type to which without is applied purely as a certain kind of operator. The concatenations without + expression are, typically, equivalent to more prolix without-free collocations; thus, without is a suitable device for text compression.